Animatable Gaussians: Learning Pose-dependent Gaussian Maps for High-fidelity Human Avatar Modeling

Zhe Li, Zerong Zheng, Lizhen Wang, Yebin Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 19711-19722

Modeling animatable human avatars from RGB videos is a long-standing and challenging problem. Recent works usually adopt MLP-based neural radiance fields (NeRF) to represent 3D humans but it remains difficult for pure MLPs to regress pose-dependent garment details. To this end we introduce Animatable Gaussians a new avatar representation that leverages powerful 2D CNNs and 3D Gaussian splatting to create high-fidelity avatars. To associate 3D Gaussians with the animatable avatar we learn a parametric template from the input videos and then parameterize the template on two front & back canonical Gaussian maps where each pixel represents a 3D Gaussian. The learned template is adaptive to the wearing garments for modeling looser clothes like dresses. Such template-guided 2D parameterization enables us to employ a powerful StyleGAN-based CNN to learn the pose-dependent Gaussian maps for modeling detailed dynamic appearances. Furthermore we introduce a pose projection strategy for better generalization given novel poses. Overall our method can create lifelike avatars with dynamic realistic and generalized appearances. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. Code: https://github.com/lizhe00/AnimatableGaussians.